Too many problems, not enough time.

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I’m still learning the ins and outs of vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). From what I have seen so far I’m liking it. vMA is a Vmware appliance that’s been around since vSphere 4. Since then it’s gone through a couple revisions.

I originally installed vMA 5 while looking for a way to consolidate all my ESX host log files to an easy to access repository. Researching vMA I came across vilogger. I thought this was great and installed the appliance. When I went to configure vilogger in vMA I found that the command was no longer available, vilogger had been deprecated in vMA 5. Turns out that Syslog is the new ‘in’ way of logging.

All was not lost. It turned out to be a nice convenient way to manage all my ESXi hosts. It contains the vSphere command-line interface and the SDK for Perl. It can store your credentials for all your hosts making it easy to script with.

The above screenshot I’m trying to run Remote ESXTOP on the vMA. I know VMware has some of the sorriest error messages but this was too good not to post up. Turns out it’s better to run Remote ESXTOP specifing the FQDN of the host and not just the hostname. The actual root cause was because the vMA was using DHCP and had a different domain name then the ESX host.